


Sometimes it Snows in Hawaii

by Midorisakura (Calacious)



Series: Ho oku i [6]
Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Claustrophobia, Community: cottoncandy_bingo, Fluff and Angst, Hypothermia, I Becomes We, M/M, Sex in a sleeping bag, Snow
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-20
Updated: 2014-02-20
Packaged: 2018-01-13 04:14:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1212301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Calacious/pseuds/Midorisakura
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve takes Danny camping on Mauna Kea. Other than Danny's dislike of tight spaces (tents are not exactly wide-open havens), and the probability of natural disaster (dormant volcanoes have been known to erupt) what could possibly go wrong?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sometimes it Snows in Hawaii

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: Written for densidoodle, who wrote the following in a review: “A good read on a snowy morning. Socked in by a blizzard. They DO get snow in Hawaii on the mountain tops you know. Just a thought. We all know how much Steve LOVES camping....”
> 
> Current, and successful, attempt at writing this was inspired by, The Neighbourhood’s, “Sweater Weather.” (Discovered on YouTube by accident) - link to the song in the story. 
> 
> Word Count: 10,206 words; cotton_candy bingo square – “I” becomes “We”
> 
> Would love feedback. This isn't written for profit, but for pleasure, and with the hopes that others will enjoy it as well.

 

 

["Sweater Weather," by The Neighbourhood](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCdwKhTtNNw)

The first thing that Danny notices when he wakes is the cold. It’s unusual, waking to this kind of cold in Hawaii. It reminds him of home, of Jersey. It’s disorienting, and jarring, and Danny fights to open his eyes.

He shivers, rolls over, and groans as his hip encounters a sharp rock. The sleeping bag does little to make the floor of the tent that he’s sleeping on comfortable, and he knows that he’ll have a sore back when he finally does get up to face the day.

It’s dark, and he has no idea what time it is. It’s eerily quiet, and Danny distinctly remembers falling asleep to the disconcerting sound of howling wind, and Steve reassuring him that it wasn’t from an impending storm, that it was normal on the top of a mountain.

“Go back to sleep, Danny,” Steve mumbles. Eyes closed; lips barely moving.

Steve’s hand flaps around on the ground between them until it finds Danny, and then the still half-asleep man pats Danny’s face. Danny pushes Steve’s hand away from his face, snags the man’s fingers in his own, and tugs, trying to regain some of the warmth that he lost during the course of the night.

Danny would love nothing more than to go back to sleep, but his bladder is full, and it’s cold, and he and Steve must’ve rolled apart in their sleep, because he’s no longer lying right next to Danny, sharing body heat that had bordered on almost too hot when they’d gone to sleep.

Now, there’s not enough heat, and Danny has to pee, and the still-sleeping Steve is being stubbornly immoveable. No amount of tugging on Steve’s outstretched arm is drawing the man any closer, and the rock is digging painfully into Danny’s hip, stealing his breath, making him see stars.

Danny rubs at his face, trying to push away the vestiges of sleep, and he shifts away from the rock, further from Steve, letting go of the hold he’s got on his partner’s fingers. It feels like the temperature’s dropped to something bordering on below zero, and Danny pulls the sleeping bag around his shoulders.

There’s a rock digging into his left ass cheek, and Danny scowls into the darkness as he tries to find a section of the ground that’s relatively rock free. He doesn’t like camping, had _told_ Steve that, but the man’s puppy dog eyes (so much like Grace’s…and how’s that even fucking possible, the two aren’t related?) had been Danny’s undoing.

When Steve had turned those powerful eyes on him, lips downturned slightly in a sad, I’m-trying-not-to-frown look, Danny had caved. Had agreed to a weekend of camping, on the Big Island, with Steve. His, ‘Yes,’ barely dying on his lips before Steve had captured them in a toe-curling kiss that had left Danny weak-kneed, his heart pounding loudly in his ears.

Danny yawns, feels his breath hanging in the air before him for a few seconds bordering on forever as he blinks in the darkness of the tent. It’s so quiet outside of the tent that he can hear Steve breathing beside him. The man’s quiet intake of breath, the way it whistles, slightly, through his lips when he breathes out. It’s normal, and yet there’s something off, and Danny wishes that he could put his finger on what it is that’s bothering him. Other than the cold.

He has to pee, but he doesn’t want to move. Recalls too many mornings like this when he was a kid, and his mom had woken him for school. Just the thought of his bare feet touching the cold, wooden floor, had made him turn his back on his mother, pull his pillow over his head, and fight for just a few more minutes of sleep, and warmth.

In the end, he’d have to wake, face the freezing floors, feet flying across them to the bathroom, as though speed would somehow take away some of the cold that seeped into the soles of his feet, shocking him awake. He’d tiptoe across the tiled bathroom floor, and then, after taking care of his most immediate need, he’d rush back to his bedroom, pull on thick winter socks.

He’s got no winter socks here, though. It’s Hawaii. It’s not supposed to be _this_ cold, top of the tallest (measuring from the floor of the Pacific Ocean) mountain in the world, and on an island, or not. The websites that he’d looked at had promised temperatures of seventy to eighty degrees, nothing lower than sixty, but it’s got to be at least fifty degrees, maybe less, right now.

Danny had been prepared to see red, molten lava and dark clouds filled with volcanic ash. He’d been prepared for cooler nights than he’d grown used to since he’d followed his daughter to the island of O’ahu. He’d packed a jacket, and had worn jeans.

Now, Danny wishes that he had the cream-colored cable knit sweater that his Nana had knitted for him several years ago. The one that he’d given to Mattie just before he’d moved away. He wonders what his younger brother did with the sweater, if Mattie’s got it tucked away in a dresser, or if he’d brought it with him when he’d come to visit Danny before trying to run away from the mess that he’d gotten himself into.

Danny casts another look in Steve’s direction, and though it’s dark, he can make out the shape of his partner. Steve’s chest is rising and falling, evenly, and there’s no indication that he’s aware of the drop in temperature. He’s dead to the world, and Danny smiles, because, usually Steve’s a light sleeper, and, in Danny’s estimation, he doesn’t get enough sleep on any given night.

In spite of how uncomfortable and cold he is Danny’s happy to see Steve so at ease. Loosening his hold on the top edge of his sleeping bag, Danny frees a hand, and reaches across the cold space between them, rubs his thumb along Steve’s un-furrowed brow, marvels at how peaceful Steve looks when he’s asleep.

Danny sucks in a breath when Steve’s forehead suddenly creases beneath the pad of his thumb. Steve frowns, smacks his lips, and then rolls over, and Danny breathes again, happy that, in spite of how cold and ill-at-ease _he_ is, Steve can sleep. That the man feels comfortable enough, with Danny at his side, to let his guard down enough to rest.

Danny rests his hand on the back of Steve’s head, marvels at how soft the man’s hair is, and that he has the privilege of running his fingers through it, and – god willing – will have that pleasure for the rest of his life.

The cold, seeping in through the bottom of the tent and the worn sleeping bag, to his ass, his legs, all the way up through the core of his body, causes Danny to shift, reminds him that he has to pee, but he doesn’t want to leave the tent, or Steve’s warmth, even though, for the time being, he’s bereft of it, because there’s too much space between them – a little less than a foot. Too much space and it’s too cold for Hawaii, and Danny _really_ has to pee, and he’s so tired, but he can’t sleep.

Danny scrubs a hand over his face, lets the top of the sleeping bag fall down past his shoulders, pool in his lap. He’s got to move, to get up and pull on the hiking boots that Steve had insisted he bring. He’s half tempted to leave the tent barefooted, in spite of the cold and the sharp rocks, cooled lava, which might cut his feet.

“Suck it up,” Danny whispers, and he recalls the cold, winter mornings when he’d walked barefoot onto the snow-dusted porch to retrieve the morning newspaper, and how he’d return to the bed that he and Rachel shared, warming his feet between the sheets. How Rachel would hiss out a curse when his cold feet touched her warm skin, and roll away from him, denying him the warmth that he sought. Danny wonders if Steve would do the same. If, when Danny returns to the tent, seeking out Steve’s warmth, the man would push him away.

Danny shakes his head, and focuses on the here and now. On the fact that he has to pee, and it’s cold, and his boots are just on the other side of the tent flap, hidden beneath the vestibule of Steve’s fancy tent.

There are no snakes, no critters that Danny needs to worry about hiding themselves in his boots. He’s just met with the task of getting himself out of his sleeping bag, making it across the small space to the front of the tent, and then shoving his boots onto his feet.

Danny takes a deep breath, and then he shoves out of the sleeping bag, pulling his legs and feet out of its relative warmth, exposing his bare legs to the cold air, wishing that he hadn’t changed into shorts for sleeping. He’s got sweats, but they’re in the duffel on the other side of Steve, and Danny doesn’t want to wake him.

Besides, it shouldn’t take him that long to find the area designated for taking care of such needs, and to relieve himself, and return to the tent. He’d have already been there and back had he not taken forever to decide to move.  

Danny launches himself across the floor, holds his breath as he unzips the tent, hoping that the sound, though it’s a barely there whisper, won’t wake Steve. He scrambles out of the tent, and zips it up behind him, his fingers trembling in the much cooler air.

It’s not until he’s tugging the boots onto his feet that he realizes just how cold it is. There’s a full moon out, and Danny’s grateful, because he forgot to grab the flashlight in his haste to escape the close confines of the tent.

Yet another reason he doesn’t like camping – cramped quarters. It hadn’t been too bad when he’d gone to sleep; Steve lying next to him, facing him. Looking into Steve’s eyes had helped to keep the nylon walls from closing in.

Shivering in earnest, Danny’s fingers fumble with the laces of his boots, and he foregoes tying them in favor of making his trek across the moonlit expanse that much quicker. His bladder is painfully full, and Danny’s not sure if he can make it the few yards that he needs to, and he chastises himself for not moving quicker after he’d first woken.

But he’s never been a very quick thinker in the middle of the night. Even when Grace was just a baby and it was his turn to take care of her. He’d stumble from bed, careen into a wall or two, and wouldn’t fully be awake until she’d been fed, changed, and rocked back to sleep. Danny spent the bulk of those early days, when Grace was a newborn, sleepwalking his way through caring for his baby girl. It was a wonder that he hadn’t dropped her.

When Danny finally does manage to make his way past the tent’s vestibule, he simply stops breathing for a few heartbeats, and is momentarily struck dumb with awe. He stands still, dimly aware of the moon and the stars shining up above – they seem close enough to touch this high up, and it’s breathtaking. Even more breathtaking than that, though, is the completely unexpected whiteness that surrounds him as the light of the moon cuts a sliver sparkling path across a frozen, winter wonderland. 

Snow. It’s unbelievable, and Danny’s breath catches in his throat. Dressed in nothing more than a pair of ratty shorts, a threadbare tee-shirt and untied boots, he’s shivering, but it doesn’t matter. It’s beautiful, and he wishes that Steve was awake to enjoy this moment with him.

There’s snow as far as he can see, and not much else. It should be alarming, because, for the time being, he’s trapped, on top of a volcano and there’s no way down from the summit until the snow’s cleared. 

Just yesterday, he and Steve were traipsing across a valley of hardened lava, sweating in what must’ve been hundred-degree weather, and now he’s completely surrounded by snow, which accounts for the eerie quiet that seems to have descended upon the mountain.

Danny’s bladder pulls him from his thoughts, begs for relief, and he shuffles forward on feet that have grown unused to walking on snow. It’s more than a foot, maybe even two, deep. His boots sink into the snow, and the icy substance sneaks its way inside, past the lip and tongue of the boots, down to his bare feet, giving him goose bumps.

Now that he’s out past the entrance of the tent, turned around facing it, Danny can see that it’s covered in snow, which should’ve insulated the tent and made it warm, rather than cold. He doesn’t waste time wondering why he was cold when he shouldn’t have been, though he thinks that going from watching the lava flow and being baked by the sun to the height of the mountain, where the air is thinner and cooler, all in the same day might’ve had something to do with that.

He wastes no time relieving himself when he reaches the area that Steve had shown him earlier, and then he trudges back, following the path that he forged through the snow on his way from the tent. He staggers, nearly falls face first into the snow, but quickly regains his balance.

He’s only been living in Hawaii for three, almost four years, and he’s already forgotten how to walk in snow. It’s unnerving, and Danny wishes that Grace could be here with Steve and him, that his little girl could build a snowman, maybe go sledding like she used to when she was younger. Or maybe they’d build a snow fort, or have a snowball fight, or just lie in the snow and make snow angels. There’d be hot cocoa with marshmallows for Grace, and two piping hot cups of coffee waiting for Danny and Steve when they were done.

Danny brushes aside a stray tear, and stubbornly squares his jaw, his hands fisting at his sides. He draws in a shaky breath, holds it, and watches it fog out of his mouth when he sets it free.

He misses home, misses his Mom and Pop, his sisters. He misses snow that isn’t preceded by hundred-degree weather, and deadly rivers of molten lava. He misses winter, and sweaters, and plodding through knee-high snowdrifts, shoveling snow at midnight, scraping just enough frost from his windshield so that he can see out of it to drive at a snail’s pace along icy streets, and running across freezing cold floors in his bare feet.

“Danny?”

Steve’s voice startles him, and Danny looks up, hadn’t realized that he’d been looking down at his feet, at the silvery-white snow surrounding them. When he looks up at Steve, he realizes that he’s grinning like a madman – cheeks stretched so wide they’re aching.

He can’t help it, though. It’s been years since he’s seen snow in anything other than pictures, and even though he’s having a hard time wrapping his head around the fact that he’s standing on top of the largest mountain in the world, and that just a few hours ago he’d been baking in the sun, earning himself a painful sunburn in spite of the liberal amounts of sun block he’d applied to his skin, he’s happy in a way that he hasn’t been in a really long time – relationship with Steve aside.

“What’s –” Steve’s voice cracks, his mouth hanging open on his half-formed question.

He gives Danny a wide-eyed look as he spins around in front of the tent. His boots are likewise untied, and he stumbles his way toward Danny. Unlike Danny, Steve had slept shirtless, and he’s shivering, arms wrapped around himself by the time that Danny, spurred by Steve’s lurching movements, meets him halfway.

Danny can’t help but laugh at the picture that Steve makes – hair unkempt, eyes wide and filled with an almost childlike wonder, mouth opening and closing as he tries to understand what it is that he’s seeing. Danny pulls Steve to himself, marveling at how cold Steve is as he wraps his arms around him, lending what little warmth he has to the other man.

“What’s going on?” Steve’s voice is muffled because he’s tucked his face against Danny’s neck.

Danny chuckles quietly, rubs some warmth into Steve’s bare back with the palm of his hand. “Don’t tell me you’ve never seen snow before, Steven.”

He loves the man, enough to die for him, but this – Steve completely flummoxed, and mouth agape because of a couple of feet of snow, and seeking solace in Danny’s arms – is funny, and a little unsettling.

Apparently Steve McGarrett, super, kick-ass SEAL, is completely out of his element in the snow. It’s a good thing that Danny Williams, up until he’d followed after Grace, had been somewhat of an expert on snow. It had been out of necessity, because snow hadn’t been a rarity in the days leading up to his move to Hawaii.

Oh, Danny knows that Steve’s been around snow before. Steve lived on the mainland when he was a teenager, has been in the mountains of Afghanistan (even if those missions were top secret and Steve hadn’t been able to tell Danny anything about them, other than how long, cold and miserable the winters were), and well, he’s Steve.

Danny doesn’t think there’s much that can make Steve ill-at-ease. At least he’s not seen that happen to Steve outside of now, and when they’ve got cases where they have to work with young children. Besides Grace, now that he’s used to her, Steve hasn’t proven himself to be very good with children. Of course he’s now got a brand new niece with whom to practice being an uncle, and working with kids in general.

Danny, on the other hand, has a whole slew of things which make him ill-at-ease: tight spaces, hiking, the ocean…it’s a non-exhaustive list, and one that he’s not particularly proud of. He’s got areas of expertise, too. Some of which Steve knows nothing about, yet. Others that, god-willing, Steve will never learn of.

“It’s so cold,” Steve mumbles.

“Snow tends to be cold,” Danny murmurs. “I thought you said that there was no snow in the forecast for this weekend.” Danny keeps his voice light, devoid of any chastisement, knowing that Steve doesn’t need that right now.

The man’s shivering in earnest, and Danny, while no longer outright freezing now that he’s fully awake, is doing little better than Steve. _The blind leading the blind,_ Danny thinks, and, after helping Steve relieve himself – shaky hands, mild curses muted by the cold – he moves them in the direction of the tent. There, they can get warmed up, because there’s no way he, or Steve, is going to get hypothermia in Hawaii – snow or not. It’s unconscionable.

Once he’s managed to usher the both of them inside the tent, Danny wastes no time getting Steve ensconced in one of the sleeping bags. Steve’s shivering so badly that his teeth are chattering, and unless Danny’s mistaken, the man’s lips have taken on a bluish tinge.

Danny rummages through their shared duffel, tosses Steve a pair of sweats that he knows will be too short for the man, because Steve hadn’t brought any sweats of his own – he’s got khakis and those are not going to be warm enough.

Danny isn’t sure why he’d insisted on packing the sweats either – other than it had been fun to watch that vein on Steve’s neck pop out when Danny had claimed that it was sleepwear, and hadn’t backed down, returning them to the duffel every time Steve had taken them out. He’s just glad that he’d been so persistent, even if it had been little more than a game at the time.  

Danny searches for a suitable shirt for Steve, wishing again for that sweater that his Nana knitted him all those years ago. He hadn’t cherished it nearly as much as he should have. He pulls out a pair of jeans for himself, socks for him and Steve, and tosses Steve a shirt, tugs one on over himself, and feels a little warmer already.

“You know, Danno, we really should uh…” Steve’s not looking at Danny, his voice is softer than usual, and he clears his throat. “The…it’s snowing, cold.” Steve shivers. “And –”

Steve’s got Danny’s sweats balled up in his hands, and there’s a blush burning beneath his too-white cheeks, making him look so damn vulnerable and _cute._ Steve and cute are not typically synonymous. As a matter-of-fact, they’re pretty incongruous, and Danny momentarily stops pawing through the duffel to take a good look at his partner.

Steve’s still shivering, but not as much as he’d been when they’d been outside, exposed to the elements. His normally bronze skin is a pasty, almost white, which sets off alarm bells in Danny’s head.

He remembers his first year as a cop, finding an elderly woman, frozen to death on a park bench. She’d just sat down to rest, feed the birds, and the coroner said that she’d simply fallen asleep. Danny and his partner had found her, covered in a thin layer of snow; skin a sickly shade of blue. No one had known she was missing. It was sad, and Danny’d never forgotten that.

Steve’s a long way from freezing to death, but he wasn’t exactly his normal self right now. He’s a little sluggish, slurring his words; the puzzled look in his eyes when he raises them to look at Danny, and the sudden decrease in shivering, all point to a mild case of hypothermia. Which means that Danny has to get Steve warmed up fairly quickly, and then keep him warm.

They don’t have blankets, or those quick heat packs, or even a thermos of hot coffee. There’s not even a camping stove. Steve had insisted that they wouldn’t need it, that they’d head down the mountain for breakfast in the morning.

Danny isn’t sure what Steve’s trying to communicate to him when he holds the sweats up as though sacrificing them to Danny, and looks at Danny through the fringes of his eyelashes. He’s still blushing, the pink in his cheeks making him look feverish in spite of the slight tremors that continue to run through his body, an innate impulse which produces shivering in an attempt to raise body heat. It’s a good sign that Steve is still shivering.

Danny’s shivering too, and he isn’t certain that the warmth he’s feeling right now is such a good thing, but he can’t worry about himself when Steve’s looking at him as though Danny holds all of the answers.

“You’re supposed to put those on,” Danny says, momentarily discarding his jeans in favor of helping Steve with the sweats. It’s clear to him that Steve needs help even though the man isn’t asking for it. It isn’t often that Steve asks for help – with or without words – and Danny isn’t going to waste an opportunity to do something for the stubborn SEAL that he’d normally scoff at.

“Can do it myself,” Steve says, setting his jaw, and glaring at Danny, pulling the sweats toward himself. “”M fine, you should worry ‘bout yourself.”

Danny raises an eyebrow at Steve, and shakes his head. “Look, Steven, it’s cold, and I’m too tired for this. Give me the damn sweats and let me help you get them on.”

“They’re too small,” Steve argues, giving the sweats a skeptical look. “Not going to fit.”

In other circumstances, this would be funny, and Danny would take a picture of Steve, clutching Danny’s worn sweats to his chest, while, at the same time, trying to push them on Danny. It’s both oddly endearing, and extremely frustrating.

When another teeth-chattering shiver wracks Steve’s body, Danny pinches the bridge of his nose, and sets about wresting the sweats from his partner’s surprisingly strong grip, and ends up falling on his ass for his efforts.  A sharp rock bites into his backside and Danny winces, tugs the sweats free from Steve’s grip, and scowls at the man that he loves.

“You know I love you, right?” Danny asks, narrowing his eyes at Steve, as he tries to control his own increasingly incessant shivers.

A thought niggles at the back of Danny’s mind when Steve crosses his arms over his still bare chest – goose bumps standing out even in the dim light of the tent – and lobs a frown at Danny that reminds him too much of Grace on the rare occasion that she’s pouting because she hasn’t gotten her way. Not that Grace always has to have her way with things, most of the time she’s okay with the decisions that her parents make, but like all kids, she has her moments. All that’s lacking to make the comparison complete is the trembling lower lip.

It isn’t this; however, which jogs Danny’s memory of something that he’d watched on some survival show a few years back. He’d been working on a six pack of cheap beer, supplying his own witty, running commentary, at the time, and it’s this memory that seeing Steven half-dressed, shivering, near-pout affixed on his face, brings to mind.

“Shared body heat,” Danny says the words aloud, working the idea out in his mind even as he shoves off the cold tent floor, discarding the too-short sweats as a lost cause. Right now, he’s got a better idea in mind, and one that he doesn’t think Steve will be opposed to.

Steve gives Danny a dubious look while keeping an eye on the abandoned sweats, as though he’s afraid that Danny will try to force them on him. It’s laughable, because, even on a good day, Danny doubts that he could force anything on Steve.

Danny isn’t weak, not by a long shot, but Steve’s probably got moves that Danny’s never seen, or even heard of, before. Danny knows that, if he and Steve were pitted against each other for some reason, Steve would come out on top.

Though it hurts Danny’s pride to even think it, he knows that, in a contest of brawn, Steve would win. Now, if it was a battle of the brains, and witty remarks, provided that Chin wasn’t in the same contest, Danny would win, hands down.

It’s with that thought in mind that Danny approaches a now wary Steve. Steve scoots away until his back hits the wall of the nylon tent, causing the whole tent to shudder as the thick layer of snow that had covered the tent is disturbed, causing the snow to sluice off the tent. It’s unusually loud, and Steve’s eyes grow wide, and they both seem to hold their breath.

“Steve, here’s the deal,” Danny says, kneeling a foot in front of Steve, his hands held benignly in front of him, not reaching for Steve, though he wants to. He can feel a rock poking his right kneecap, another stabbing his left ankle. If Danny never sees a rock after this ordeal, he’ll be a happy man.

“We’re both in danger of hypothermia right now. It’s either the sweats and that long-sleeve tee-shirt you packed, or –” Danny draws in a deep breath, licks his lips, keeps his eyes locked on Steve’s, tries to ignore the impulse to simply dive at the man and show Steve what he wants to do.

He’s colder now than he was when he was standing outside, and Danny thinks that maybe he should’ve shoved socks, rather than a long-sleeved shirt on, because his feet feel like icicles. They’d been caked with snow that had snuck in past his boots’ defenses, and now they’re so cold that they’re almost numb, which he knows, from experience, is not a good thing.

Frostbite cost one of his great uncle’s half a nose, and his right big toe. He’d been lucky, but Danny hadn’t thought so when his father’s dad’s brother had visited them one Christmas. Danny’d been nine at the time, and had found it difficult not to openly stare at the missing portion of his uncle’s face. It gave him nightmares for weeks afterwards, though he’d never told his parents that, saying that the nightmares were from a horror movie that he’d watched, which meant that he’d not been allowed to watch another horror movie, or even just a ‘scary’ show, for a year and a half afterwards.

“You’re shivering, Danno,” Steve says, and he inches closer to Danny, reaching a chilly hand out toward him.

“You, too, buddy,” Danny says, offering Steve a smile, and closing the gap between them, encountering yet another rock in the process.

He’ll probably return to O’ahu covered in a series of deep, pock-marked bruises, or maybe they’ll blend together into one, large bruise. He wonders if Steve’s ass is being similarly abused by the rocky terrain.

“We’re both cold, and we need to get warmed up,” Danny says, suiting action to words when he snags the edge of Steve’s sleeping bag.

It’s not an overly large sleeping bag, and Danny wonders if this will work, if he’ll be able to squeeze into the sleeping bag beside Steve. In theory, his plan should work, but in the reality of the situation that he’s currently in, Danny wonders how.

“What’re you doing, Danny?” Steve asks. Whether consciously or not, he’s gripping the edge of his sleeping bag tightly, as though he’s afraid Danny’s going to steal it.

“Steve, we need to get warm, and...” suddenly tired, Danny trails off, gestures between the two of them, and Steve’s sleeping bag, with a shaky hand.

Steve’s eyebrows shoot up to his hairline, and then he blinks, and Danny’s stomach feels like lead. At home, they share a bed, their lives, and all Danny wants to do right now is share some body warmth, but it seems that Steve is either, a.) not getting it, or, b.) doesn’t want to share his sleeping bag.

The implications of that second option make Danny’s head spin. There’s a small part of him that knows he’s being irrational, that it’s the cold, his frozen feet, the rocks embedding themselves into every inch of his body whenever he moves, and not a sign of Steve rejecting him.

“C’mere, Danny,” Steve’s voice is low, and Danny doesn’t have the energy to look at him.

Danny can hear the shiver in Steve’s voice, knows that the man’s bare skin is still a peculiar hue, bordering on a frosty, light blue. He wonders if his skin looks the same, hasn’t dared to look at his feet, which are starting to lose sensation.

Danny crawls toward Steve, ignoring, as best as he can, the pointy rocks that seem to go out of their way to stab every, as of yet, untouched surface of his body. He’s not sure how the hell he’s going to fit into the small space that’s left in the sleeping bag. There’s barely enough space for Steve, let alone Danny.

“Shit, you’re freezing cold,” both of them say at the same time, laughing a little hysterically.

Steve pulls on the zipper with shaking fingers, and holds the edge of the sleeping bag open for Danny. Danny almost laughs when he realizes how simple it is, wondering why he hadn’t thought of this before, thinking that he’d have to crawl in with Steve through the small opening at the top of the bag. It didn’t make any sense, and he thinks that maybe he’s in just as much trouble as Steve is.

“Fuck,” Steve hisses. He flinches when Danny’s feet press against his much warmer calves, leeching every bit of warmth from them that they can.

“Danny, your feet are like fucking popsicles,” Steve complains, but he pulls Danny close, pushes Danny’s head down onto his chest.

When Danny’s body is flush against his, Steve shimmies as far down into the sleeping bag as he can get, and then he works at the zipper, cursing beneath his breath when it snags. Steve’s got more patience than Danny with this kind of thing, and Danny lies there, on top of Steve, marveling at how the man, even without the benefit of being able to see what he’s doing, works the bunched fabric free from the zipper and then manages, somehow, to secure the sleeping bag around them.

It’s tight, there’s barely room to breathe, and Danny’s never been more aware of just how muscular Steve really is than at this moment. It’s almost distracting.

The muscles of the man’s calves and thighs are rather remarkable. And Steve’s muscles don’t stop there. No, Danny’s never been quite _this_ aware of Steve’s abs before. They are nearly rock solid, and Danny laughs, burying his face against Steve’s chest, until he can get his laughter under control. Even secured between Steve and the fabric of a sleeping bag, he’s being poked by rocks, albeit far more intriguing and enjoyable rocks than those provided by Mauna Kea.

Danny has a sinking feeling that he’s kind of losing his mind, getting more than just a little loopy. _Hypothermia will do that to you,_ he thinks, and it’s his father’s voice, in full-on lecturing mode, that he’s hearing in his head, not his own.

“Danny?” Steve’s voice pulls Danny back, sobers him up, and his laughter subsides. “You okay?’

Danny nods. “You?”

Steve coughs, and then shifts, and Danny wonders if there’s a big rock digging into Steve’s ass, or something. He can relate to that. But then Danny feels something else hard, and stiff, digging into his hip, and Danny almost laughs again, but he holds his breath for a steady count of three, until the insane urge to laugh leaves him.

His body’s not on the same page as Steve’s, though, and Danny blames his ice-covered feet for that. They’re starting to regain feeling, with the aid of Steve’s warm calves. It feels like they’re covered with those tiny red ants that had infested Danny’s first apartment when he’d moved to O’ahu. He’d fall asleep, only to wake battling the tiny red devils until the wee hours of the morning. He’d been covered in welts for a good solid month before he’d finally convinced the super to have the apartment building fumigated. He’d moved shortly after that, leaving the biting ants, and field mice behind.

“Sorry, babe,” Danny says.

“’S okay,” Steve says, and he shifts his weight again. “Should probably take your shirt off, though.”

Danny can feel the muscles in Steve’s chest and arms bunch as he moves his hands, reaching for the bottom edge of Danny’s shirts, and his stomach flutters when the man’s hard-on brushes against his thigh. His feet are buzzing with electricity now, and he tries to move them to a warmer section of Steve’s calves, feels, as though through an extra thick layer of skin and flesh, Steve’s calf muscles contract beneath his icy toes.

“Sorry,” Danny bites his bottom lip, hating that he has to use Steve like this.

“It’s okay, Danny, your feet are always cold,” Steve’s voice is so matter-of-fact that Danny’s head snaps up.

Danny frowns, and he shoves at Steve’s hands, which have managed to wriggle Danny’s shirts up to the lower edge of h is ribcage. Steve’s grip doesn’t loosen, and Danny feels like an ass when all he manages to do is get his fists tangled up in the shirts that Steve’s only trying to help him out of. Skin-to-skin contact is much more conducive to building friction, and heat between them, and Danny feels like he’s trapped in the sleeve of a sweater right now.

He can feel panic licking at the edge of his mind, and he fights it back, because having a panic attack right now would be counter-productive.

“My feet are _not_ cold,” Danny says, and he digs his toes into Steve’s too-hard calves, feels the muscles clench, and tries to free his trapped fists.

Steve doesn’t answer, just grunts and makes a sound that is suspiciously a lot like a chuckle. Danny’s toes feel like they’re crawling with electrified maggots, and he presses the side of his face against Steve’s chest, lets Steve continue to work the shirts free, ducking, and moving his arms when Steve quietly urges him to.

When he’s finally free of the layered shirts, Danny wonders if the SEAL had an easier time working Catherine’s bras free when they were together. He wonders, a little jealously, if Steve misses that – the ease with which he could manipulate a bra, the feel of warm, full breasts tensing and shivering beneath his calloused hands.

Danny wonders if Steve misses her, misses how easy things were between them. Danny knows that things aren’t easy between Steve and him, that they fight more than Steve fought with Catherine.

“Sure, they aren’t, Danno,” Steve’s easy agreement with him does little to ease the new fears that have gathered in Danny’s mind. They keep the tent walls from closing in, but they form new walls which aren’t fair to Steve, or him.

Steve’s fingers are cold where they press into Danny’s back, and Danny draws in a sharp breath, bites down on his tongue to keep from saying something snarky. Danny struggles not to claw his way out of the sleeping bag, closes his eyes and tries to pretend that he’s not trapped in a sleeping bag inside of a tent, which makes him feel a little like one of those nesting dolls that his mother collects.

He remembers looking at them when he was a kid, and feeling a kinship with the one that was nested within the innermost layer where there was barely any space, and it was dark. Danny’s never liked closed in spaces, has good reasons for it, too. It’s not an irrational fear. Not something he’s ever spoken about with his therapist either.

Danny supposes that, here, and now, with Steve’s body lying solidly beneath his, that the fear he feels building up inside of him is more than just a little irrational. He tries to force his thoughts away from the fact that he’s on an island, situated in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, that he’s furthermore inside the crater of a dormant volcano. That he’s nested within a tent that’s surrounded by snow, and that Steve and he are bound together, within a sleeping bag that’s so taut that the zipper might not even come free if the track’s been stretched beyond its limits.

Danny tries, but fails to keep the panic from rising up in his gut. He tries to keep from pushing at Steve. But he wants, _needs_ space. Needs to breathe.

He can’t breathe, because there’s not enough air. There’s not enough air for both Steve and him, and Danny would give air up for Steve, he would, but he can’t, and the world is spinning in a universe that’s too big for him to comprehend, but it’s dizzying, and he can’t breathe, and Steve’s fingers are digging into his back, Danny’s toes into Steve’s calves, Steve’s dick into his thigh.

Danny can’t feel his own body, there’s just Steve and he wonders if somehow they’ve become one – if he’s been swallowed up by Steve. If the sleeping bag, within the tent, within the snow-covered crater on an island, in the middle of the ocean, has somehow made Danny cease to exist.

There’s a part of Danny that knows he’s not thinking rationally, and he’d love nothing more than to cling to that part of him – the rational voice inside of him, sounding an awful lot like his little nine-year-old girl – and let go of the irrational part of him that’s telling him he needs to get out of the fucking sleeping bag, and out of the tent, off the volcano, off the island.

It’s too tight here, too hot-cold-suffocating. Too tight with Steve whose muscles are hard as rock, and moving beneath-inside-around-under Danny, and it’s all too close.

And Steve’s talking, his lips moving, but Danny’s deaf, and dumb, and his toes are going to strip the flesh from Steve’s calves if he pushes them in any deeper.

There’s a part of Danny that wants to hear, and understand, whatever it is that Steve’s saying. Danny wants to hear the words that he can feel falling from lips that brush across his chilled skin, carving meaning into him with the gooseflesh that’s left behind. The words that Steve is whispering against the shell of his ear, causing warmth to snake down Danny’s spine in shivers that have nothing to do with how cold it is outside.

But Danny can’t hear Steve’s words over the sound of his and Steve’s hearts beating, the sound of his own blood rushing, like a river, in his ears. He can’t hear, and he can’t breathe, and Steve’s fingers are digging bruises into his back. The man’s whispered words are hissing at him, begging him, goading him. Teasing him, driving him mad, and he’s slipping away.

“Danny!” Steve’s shout, accompanied by a rough shake that makes Danny’s teeth rattle in his head, jar Danny, keep him from going down the dark tunnel that had threatened to pull him under and away from Steve.

“Danny, it’s okay. You’re okay. We’re okay.” Steve’s voice is strained, as though he’s been repeating those words going on close to forever.  “C’mon, Danno, be okay. Please.”

The press of lips to his nose, his cheeks, his lips, helps to center Danny, pulls him further away from the dark tunnel, and back to Steve. Back to the sleeping bag, the tent, the snow, Steve’s body hard and yet softer than the ground.

“Danny?” Steve’s voice is whisper quiet, though it’s just the two of them for several miles of nothing.

They’d hiked here from the observatory – Steve having pre-arranged for their visit a day ahead of time – and will have to hike back the next day, to where their rented jeep is waiting for them.

Danny’s tired, and his head aches and he feels too warm, though his toes are still cold as ice cubes, and he thinks that maybe Steve might’ve been right about his feet always being cold. He should say something, but right now he just wants to sleep, because if he’s sleeping then he can’t think about the tent walls collapsing down around them, trapping Danny and crushing Steve beneath him.

“You’re right,” Danny says, and he sounds like he’s been drinking, the words slurred, not making sense. He illustrates them by moving his toes, seeking a new source for warmth, because they’re so cold.

“About what, Danny?” Steve asks. His fingers are no longer digging into Danny’s back. Steve’s hands are resting in the middle of Danny’s back, and he’s gently massaging, working some of the tension from Danny’s cramped muscles.

“M’f’t.” Danny’s lips feel nice and warm, pressed as they are against Steve’s chest.

Steve chuckles and Danny can feel the man quake beneath him, wonders what it would be like if they did something like this in Steve’s bed – Danny piled on top of him, their muscles merging, removing the negative space between them.

He wonders if Steve’s still hard, in spite of Danny’s almost-not-quite-there- but-there panic attack. Wonders if he can free his hand from where it’s wedged between Steve’s arm and side, if he can move it just far enough down Steve’s side to do him some good.

“They’re not so bad,” Steve says, and he shifts them, helping Danny find another point of warmth for his perpetually cold feet – sandwiched between Steve’s –  which no longer feel like they’re conduits for an electric fence. They just feel chilled now, and it’s a familiar feeling.

“You say that now, Steven,” Danny turns his head, peers up into Steve’s face, chin resting on Steve’s chest. “But what about forty years from now when we’ve both got icy cold feet, and neither of us can warm the other?” Danny has an inkling that what he’s just said doesn’t make much sense in the way that Steve looks at him, brow furrowing, lips pursed.

“We’ll get a dog,” Steve says, shrugging, and Danny smiles, nods, lays his head back on Steve’s chest because it’s more comfortable that way. He imagines that they’re at Steve’s place, and the bedroom door’s open, and he keeps the snow, because it fits.

Danny frees his hands, uses one to play with the fine hairs on the expanse of Steve’s stomach, trapped beneath his own, eliciting shivers that he knows have nothing to do with the low temperature. Neither of them is really cold anymore, excepting Danny’s feet, toes still cold as ice.

Slipping fingers beneath the loose band of Steve’s tented boxers, Danny’s other hand finds its way to Steve’s semi-hard erection. He smiles when Steve’s breath hitches, and he turns his head, latches lips-tongue-teeth to the nipple nearest him, lips curving when Steve’s back arches in response to his touch.

“Feel good?” Danny asks, breathing the words between well-placed kisses, tongue flicking out to wet and tease to hardness.

There’s nowhere to go, no room for Danny to move away, no personal space, and it’s electrifying, liberating as much as it’s confining, because Danny can _feel_ Steve’s moan coursing through his own chest, as though it’s he, not Steve, who’s moaning. He can feel Steve’s fine trembles when he brushes a calloused thumb over the head of Steve’s dick; the wet-hot-slick pre-cum coating his hand when he grips Steve and slides, grinds their hips together.

Steve’s holding his breath, stomach clenching, muscles bunching, and Danny plies his tongue-lips-teeth to Steve’s nipple – biting, sucking, lathing, making Steve harden, his dick jerk, his body judder. There’s a new heat between them, and Danny focuses on that, focuses on Steve, would bore a hole into him, burrow inside and become one with the man, toes curled into Steve’s calves, fingers digging into Steve’s hip.

Danny laughs, teeth fastened around a nipple, when Steve says, “ _Danny,”_ as though it’s a curse.

“ _Please,”_ Danny says, begging for a distraction from the claustrophobic nightmare that he’s stuck in.

Steve’s hand, hot, firm, finds Danny’s cock, and coaxes it to attention.

“Tell me what you want, Danny.”

It’s a demand, and Danny’s not sure what he wants.

He waits several heartbeats, kissing his way toward Steve’s chin – the bristles of a half-day’s growth of beard tickling his tongue; it’s an unfamiliar, welcome texture. The palm of Steve’s hand generates friction and heat between them; makes Danny lose sense of time and place.

“This,” the word’s wrenched from Danny on the tail end of a moan. He wants _this._ Here, now. Steve, him. The tent, the sleeping bag. And snow.

It doesn’t take long for either of them to come, and it’s sticky-hot-wet trapped between them, cooling. Danny loves how he can feel every shuddered breath that Steve takes. That, because they’re packed so tightly together, like sardines, Danny can feel every move that Steve makes. It’s heady, and exhilarating, and exhausting.

Wrapped up in Steve, nowhere to go. It’s the perfect end to a nightmare.

“I want this,” Danny murmurs, lips finding Steve’s for the space of several breaths. “Forever.”

Danny’s not aware that he’s fallen asleep until Steve stirs beneath him, light filtering in through the nylon fabric of their tent, and he’s blinking his eyes open. His face is stuck to Steve’s chest by sweat, and he shifts, tries to work the funky taste of morning from his mouth, and tries not to wake Steve, whose hands have shifted to rest on Danny’s ass over the course of the night.

For some reason it’s not suffocating, but cozy, and Danny doesn’t want this to end. Doesn’t want his life with Steve to return to the status quo – fighting, fucking, dodging bullets and bombs, avoiding the more intimate moments with practiced ease, and just sliding along, pretending to be McDanno, when in reality their ‘we’ has been little more than a series of selfish ‘I’ + ‘I’ moments where they’ve tried to jam two very distinctive personalities into one, claiming to be a couple.

Danny feels hollowed out, empty, spent, and yet, for the first time in his life, he feels whole, because he knows what he wants. Knows that he’s done with half-assing it with Steve – sharing a bed, medicine cabinet, and a sock drawer, but living separate lives.

“Danny, you awake?” Steve asks; voice husky from sleep.

Danny nods, licks his lips. “Yeah,” his voice cracks, and he clears it.

It takes some doing, but they manage to extricate themselves from the sleeping bag – Steve patiently working the zipper loose, Danny holding his breath every time it sticks, trying not to think of how bad he has to pee. When they’re free, the air is cold, and Danny misses Steve’s body heat, locks his fingers with Steve’s, and brings them to his lips, presses a kiss to Steve’s knuckles.

They dress quickly, Danny feeling strangely alone, though Steve’s no more than a foot away from him the whole time. His stomach growls and Steve rummages in the duffel, tosses him a protein bar, pulls out three more, tosses Danny a second one.

It’s quiet, inside the tent, but the wind outside has picked up once again. The protein bars make for a quick, somewhat satisfying, breakfast, and then there’s no more putting off the inevitable. Danny sighs, runs a hand through his hair, and Steve looks like a giant, hunched over in the tent. He’s not looking at Danny, and Danny isn’t sure what to make of that. Though Steve’s standing only a foot away from him, it feels to Danny as though the man’s a million miles away, and it hurts.

“Go on ahead,” Steve says when Danny hovers by the door, hand on the zipper. “I’ll catch up with you.”

There’s something off about Steve’s voice, and Danny turns abruptly, suddenly needing to get out of the tent, and away from Steve. Away from the strain that he can hear underlying the man’s words, the brusque tone that has Danny puzzled, and worried.

The obvious dismissal in Steve’s tone, in the way that he’s not looking at him makes Danny’s head spin, especially after all that had happened between them in the past twenty plus hours. Maybe the cold, the claustrophobic nightmare is still fucking with his head. Maybe he’s reading Steven wrong.

Danny’s fingers are shaking, and he fumbles with the zipper, somehow manages to open the tent flap and step out of the tent. He blindly shoves his feet into his boots, takes the time to tie them, and then walks out into the snow, his feet finding the path that he’d forged yesterday, walking on autopilot.

The wind whips through his hair, pelts his face with snow crystals kicked up from the ground. He’s numb, and his heart hurts, and he can’t go through something like this again. Can’t survive another big, life-altering breakup. His divorce from Rachel had almost, quite literally, killed him.

He chokes on a bitter laugh, brushes aside an angry tear, and closes his eyes against the wind. Losing Steve is like losing a piece of himself, and, until this moment – knowing that Steve’s about to end their relationship – Danny hadn’t realized just how much he loved the other man.

When he and Rachel had divorced, Danny had thought that was the end of love for him. That he’d never love anyone as much as he’d loved Rachel. That the part of him capable of loving another human being as much as he’d loved her had died, along with his marriage.

He’d been wrong. Steve had awakened an even deeper love inside of him, and there was no returning from that. No recovering.

Danny relieves himself, and takes a deep breath to clear his head. The air’s cold, and it fortifies him, lends him strength. He needs every bit of strength that he can beg, borrow and steal if he’s going to make it through the next few hours that it’ll take him and Steve to make it down the mountain without breaking down.

Danny’s not too proud to admit that he’s a passionate man. A man who isn’t afraid to show his emotions – good and bad. Quick to anger, and likewise to compassion, Danny’s never been ashamed of his tears, but he brushes them aside, knowing that they’ll just confuse Steve, and make it harder on the other man, and he loves Steve too much to do that to him, even if the man is going to break his heart.

Later, when he’s patched his heart together, Danny’ll give Steven a piece of his mind for bringing him to another island, isolating him from the rest of the world, and their o’hana, just to break up with him. It doesn’t make sense, and yet it does, because Steve wouldn’t want to do something like this in front of family.

There’s a small part of Danny that knows he’s not thinking straight, or at least hopes that he’s got his head on backwards about this. The voice of reason that’s trying to talk some sense into him sounds an awful lot like Grace for some reason.

_Danno, Uncle Steven loves you._

And Danny can picture his little girl, staring up at him with her brown eyes filled with concern. He can almost feel her tugging on his hand, wrapping her arms around him in a hug.

_He wouldn’t hurt you. He promised me._

And Danny can imagine Steve making such a ludicrous promise to Grace. The man would probably promise Grace the world if she asked him, and that was yet another thing that Danny loved about Steve – how the man doted on Grace, seeming to melt whenever she turned her gaze on him. God help them both when Grace becomes a teenager.

Danny bites his tongue, and squares his chest. He can do this. He can face Steve, and whatever it is that the man’s going to say to him, and then walk down the mountain as though everything is okay. He’ll leave the emotional breakdown for when he’s home, alone, no one there to witness his weakness.

_Danno._ The echo of Grace’s voice, filled with chastisement and exasperation dies on the wind. The image he has of her, fading as Steve draws near.

Danny, chin held high, brushes past Steve when the man finally reaches him. He ignores the confused, hurt frown that Steve shoots at him, the fingers that snag the cuff of his shirt, and walks away.

“Danny?” Steve’s voice is carried to him on the wind, and Danny wants to ignore it, but something about how Steve says his name – like he’s hurt – has him turning around and waiting for Steve to catch up to him.

“Look.” Danny blows on his hands, his eyes not meeting Steve’s.

He shrugs, pushes his hands into his pockets, digs his nails into his thighs. The sharp pain grounds him, helps him to focus on the task at hand, and keeps the tears from falling. He pushes aside the image he has of Grace standing beside him, arms crossed over her chest, mouth downturned, eyes narrowed at him, a look of frustration clear on her face, and the way that she shakes her head, as though telling him to keep his mouth shut, for once.

“It’s okay; you don’t have to say anything,” Danny assures Steve, his voice sounding hollow and tinny in his own ears. He’s close to losing it, but he takes a deep breath and plunges on, needing to do this, because it can’t be like it was with Rachel.

“It’s been nice and all. The sex has been…phenomenal, but I understand. Things like this have a way of petering out. We’ve had a nice run, and –”

Danny’s words, his preemptive breakup, are silenced by Steve’s mouth – lips hot and plaintive – on his.  Steve’s hands fall to Danny’s hips, holding him in place, and the kiss, wholly unexpected, seems to last forever, stealing, not only Danny’s words, but also his breath. He’s faint and seeing stars when Steve finally releases him, pushing him back at arm’s length.

Steve’s eyes are smoldering, shining with a thin layer of unshed tears, and he’s glaring at Danny, eyes searching Danny’s face, as though hoping to find something there. And then he relaxes, the tension bleeding from his shoulders, and his eyes softening. He cups Danny’s face with a hand, rubs his thumb over Danny’s cheek, bushing away a rogue tear.

“Are you breaking up with me?” Steve asks. His voice is quiet, and filled with hopeful denial.

Danny shakes his head. “No, Steven, you’re breaking up with me. I –”

Steve shakes his head, and presses another kiss to Danny’s lips. “Danny, I’m not breaking up with you.”

Danny shrugs, can feel the heat rising to his cheeks. He can see the shadow of Grace, the mental image he has of her – her face  so like her mother’s in a smug, I-told-you-so look – and his stomach twist, and fills with butterflies.

“I…this morning, in the tent, when you sent me out…” Danny takes a deep breath, momentarily distracted by Steve’s raised eyebrow and pursed lips, the man’s hand digging into one of the many pockets of his cargo pants.

Danny forges on, “You, I thought that you were…fuck –” words have always come easily to him, and Danny’s not sure why they’re failing him now. Grace’s mocking smirk – though it’s just a figment of his imagination – only makes him feel like even more of a heel. 

He runs a hand through his hair and takes a deep breath so that he can explain to Steven what he can’t even fully understand himself. The insecurity. The feeling that there’s far too much familiarity between them, and it’s suffocating him, making his palms sweat and itch. The feeling that things are too good to last, because nothing this good ever lasted this long.

Steve grabs Danny’s hands in one of his own, and then drops to his knees, sending up a plume of white snow. Danny’s heart leaps into his throat and his vision tunnels.

“I was going to wait until we were home to do this,” Steve’s voice is throaty, and filled with emotion, tears springing to his eyes. “But, I can’t have you thinking that I was going to break up with you, and I don’t want you to break up with me.”

Steve pulls his other hand out of his pocket, revealing a simple white box. He momentarily releases Danny’s hands to open the box; the ‘click’ echoing between them. If his little girl was there right now, Danny knows that she’d be standing on her tip-toes, craning her neck over Danny’s shoulder all the better to see. Her eyes would be sparkling with joy, her hands clasped in front of her, and she’d be practically vibrating with excitement.

Danny swallows the lump that’s formed in his throat, his knees buckling. The ring – a silver band, edged in gold – is simple, yet elegant, and Danny’s awestruck, because this isn’t what he’d been expecting. Not by a long-shot.

“Danny, will you marry me?” Steve’s voice is thick, and his hands are trembling.

In his mind’s eye, Grace is watching them from the sidelines, clapping her hands together, rocking on her heels, eyes shiny with happiness. Her whispered, _Say yes, Danno,_ even though it isn’t real, because she’s not there, warms his heart.

Overcome with emotion, Danny can only nod. The goofy, lopsided grin on Steve’s face as he places the ring on Danny’s finger draws a smile from Danny, and he kneels in the snow beside Steve, not even feeling the cold.

“Yes, I’ll marry you, you big goof,” Danny says, and he places his hands on either side of Steve’s face and kisses him. It’s a long, drawn out kiss, and Danny pours every ounce of himself into it. He feels foolish for behaving like a hormonal teen, and giddy, and whole – like the world has finally stopped spinning out of control, and it’s just him and Steve, and the image of Grace, standing nearby, giving them her silent approval.

By the time they’re ready to head back, several hours later – Steve’s all loose-limbed and cocksure, and Danny’s heart’s swelling. They walk hand-in-hand, the ring – a proud weight – on Danny’s finger glints in the weakening sunlight as the world around them is blanketed in a fresh layer of snow.

Danny knows that it won’t last, that once they leave the summit of Mauna Kea, and head into the valley below, there’ll be no trace of the snow, just the memory of it – Steve knelt before him, open and vulnerable, heart laid bare.


End file.
